A selection of review by Irish Timeswrites.
NCC/Stok
National Gallery
Michael Dervan
de Leeuw - Prière. Sweelinck - Pseaume 8. De profundis. de Leeuw - Élégie pour les villes détruites. Sweelinck - Pseaume 150. Daan Manneke - Het motet voor de kardinaal
On one level, this programme from the National Chamber Choir played directly into the theme of the choir's current series, Soli Dei Gloria. The evening was full of prayers and psalms and beseechings.
On another level it was a celebration of Dutch music across the centuries. Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621) wrote copiously for the voice, but, outside of The Netherlands at least, he is most celebrated for his keyboard music.
Ton de Leeuw (1926-96) was a pupil of Messiaen who shared his teacher's interest in things oriental, and the tension between eastern and western modes and practices were reflected in his work. Daan Manneke (born 1939) studied with de Leeuw and has paid special attention to the spatialisation of music in live performance.
On a third level, the programme was a celebration of stylistic eclecticism, with even the evening's earliest works showing signs of chameleon-like adaptability in this regard.
De Leeuw's two pieces traversed a range from backward-looking, French-influenced suavity in the Prière of 1954 to a manner which ventured into the fragmentation of deconstruction in Élégie pour les villes detruites of 1994. Manneke's Het motet voor de kardinall of 2003 treads its way through a virtual maze of earlier music, embraces the eerie whistling effects of overtone singing and, in this performance, utilised the full space of the National Gallery's Shaw Room.
The singers were placed in three groups, two at the foot of the stairs, one at the back, and then there was a ringing of the changes, including processions both ways up and down the curved stairwell and along the sides of the audience.
The temporary sensation of being cocooned in a wash of gentle choral tone was genuinely remarkable. Visiting Dutch conductor Klaas Stock secured singing of warmly relaxed virtuosity from the choir, with only a few moments of frailty in one of the Sweelinck pieces, suggesting how demanding the programme must have been to prepare.
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly
Whelans, Dublin
Davin O'Dwyer
The vogue for short, sharp band names, such as the Strokes, the Killers or the Rapture, seems under threat from a new fashion for monikers that are miniature stories in themselves.
Group names such as I Love You, But I've Chosen Darkness, And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin and Suburban Kids With Biblical Names make Godspeed! You Black Emperor look like a model of concision.
It seems only a matter of time before a band use a haiku for their name, finally consigning the two-syllabled U2 to the past in the process. Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly is the musical trading name for young Sam Duckworth, a polite and energetic 20-year-old from Essex.
Understandably, if you've been saddled with a name like Sam Duckworth, it must be tempting to get a name that conjures images of superpowers and comic strips. But the verve of his musical title is rarely reflected in his music. His tunes are an easy-going folkish pop - think Badly Drawn Boy's gentler moments. With a drummer, trumpeter and iBook for accompaniment, his music occasionally approaches the raucous, but his song structures are resolutely safe, and his lyrics earnest and literal.
It obviously doesn't take any time to develop a devoted fanbase any more, because only a few months after the release of his album, The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager, there are plenty of people in the sweaty crowd who sing along to all his songs. He makes passionate speeches about Northern Ireland and defeating racism, and it's easy to see the influence of his hero Billy Bragg in songs such as War of the Worlds and I Spy. His sincerity is obvious (even if his knowledge of the Northern Ireland peace process is sketchy), but overall, and despite the name, Duckworth has yet to prove he can truly take off.
